Stonehenge

Stonehenge is a Neolithic and Bronze Age monument located near Amesbury in the English county of Wiltshire,

Whoever was the person behind Stonehenge was one dickens of a motivator, I'll tell you that. ~ Bill Bryson

Quotes

I don't like the place at all. It's all wrong. An imposition on the Landscape... ~ Terry Pratchett

• I know this goes without saying, but Stonehenge really was the most incredible accomplishment. It took five hundred men just to pull each sarsen, plus a hundred more to dash around positioning the rollers. Just think about it for a minute. Can you imagine trying to talk six hundred people into helping you drag a fifty-ton stone eighteen miles across the countryside and muscle it into an upright position, and then saying, "Right, lads! Another twenty like that, plus some lintels and maybe a couple of dozen nice bluestones from Wales, and we can party!" Whoever was the person behind Stonehenge was one dickens of a motivator, I'll tell you that.
  • Bill Bryson, in Notes from a Small Island (1995)

• When any work seems to have required immense force and labor to effect it, the idea is grand. Stonehenge, neither for disposition nor ornament, has anything admirable; but those huge rude masses of stone, set on end, and piled each on other, turn the mind on the immense force necessary for such a work. Nay, the rudeness of the work increases this cause of grandeur, as it excludes the idea of art and contrivance; for dexterity produces another sort of effect, which is different enough from this.
  • Edmund Burke, in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) §12 : Difficulty

• Much of what has been written about Stonehenge is derivative, second-rate or plain wrong.
  • Christopher Chippindale, in Stonehenge Complete (1983)

• Hello, Stonehenge! Who takes the Pandorica, takes the universe!
  • Eleventh incarnation of the Doctor, in "The Pandorica Opens" episode of the Doctor Who television series.

• Every age has the Stonehenge it deserves-or desires.
  • Jacquetta Hawkes, in God in the Machine, Antiquity 41 (1967), p. 174

• I don't like the place at all. It's all wrong. An imposition on the Landscape. I reckon that Stonehenge was build by the contemporary equivalent of Microsoft, whereas Avebury was definitely an Apple circle.
  • Terry Pratchett, at alt.fan.pratchett (8 June 1997)

• Stonehenge, where the demons dwell
  Where the banshees live and they do live well
  Stonehenge, where a man's a man
  And the children dance to the pipes of Pan.
  • Spinal Tap, in This Is Spinal Tap (1984)

• Our Soveraign here above the rest might stand;
  And here be chose again to rule the Land.
  These Ruines sheltered once His Sacred Head,
  Then when from Wor'ster's fatal Field He fled;
  Watch'd by the Genius of this Royal place,
  And mighty Visions of the Danish Race,
  HisRefuge then was for a Temple shown:
  But, He restor'd, 'tis now become a Throne.
  
  • John Dryden, From Chorea gigantum, or, The most famous antiquity of Great-Britan [sic], vulgarly called Stone-Heng, standing on Salisbury Plain, restored to the Danes by Walter Charleton

• Another very unlikely spot is made use of by daws as a place to breed in, and that is Stonehenge. These birds deposit their nests in the interstices between the upright and the impost stones of that amazing work of antiquity; which circumstance alone speaks the prodigious height of the upright stones, that they should be tall enough to secure those nests from the annoyance of shepherd boys, who are always idling round that place.
  • Reverend Gilbert White, The Natural History of Selborne (3rd ed.). Allan Bell & Company. 1834. p. 53.  (with notes by Captain Thomas Brown)

External links

• Stonehenge at English Heritage
• Stonehenge Landscape
• Ancient Places TV: HD Video of Stonehenge Excavations of 2008
• Stonehenge Today and Yesterday by Frank Stevens
• BBC : The History of Stonehenge
• Stonehenge, a Temple Restor'd to the British Druids by William Stukeley
• Stonehenge, and Other British Monuments Astronomically Considered by Norman Lockyer